Tea and cocktails? Don’t mind if I do!
Tea and a cocktail? Someone knew how to steal my heart.
We’re 13 days into the New Year now. How are those resolutions going? Mine have already been shot to pieces having gone back to the world of the 8-6 job, coping with the long, dark days and basically just resorting to the gin. Not really guys! It may be dark and cold out there but there are good ways to warm your cockles – how about an iced lychee and pomegranate green tea with a dash of rum and pomegranate syrup in it? That’s my new cocktail. We’ll call it Kat’s Winter Warmer as I have no imagination left right now so will just name it after myself.
The lovely Amanzi Tea cafe
Amanzi Tea, the name of which means water in Zulu, opened its first British outpost in Marylebone last year and has had generated a lovely local following. The history behind its US origins is really neat – in 2005 it started as a small cart in the middle of a Florida shopping mall by two tea fanatics from Zimbabwe. They went on to open an actual shop in the American South (South Carolina that is), received some attention from an extremely thoughtful investor, who has since taken them to be a large wholesale distributor and now an international company. Rumour has it that they may be opening one or two more stores, but as it’s just down the road from Selfridges, I personally am happy with the one for now. You can get a perfectly brewed takeaway (or sit in) cup of pretty much anything you wish for just for the wallet-friendly price of £2.
Downstairs – go and hide there with your laptop and a cup of tea.
I went and visited them in November for a tea and cocktails master class, hence my new cocktail. While Amanzi don’t specifically make alcoholic cocktails, they brought some of us bloggers in to show us what you could do with tea if you really put your mind to it. Aside from shaking up some rum with iced tea, I was also introduced to what I think is the best idea ever for a tea café – they have thought of EVERYTHING. Seriously, when it comes to tea, you can find it in almost every drinkable form in this Marylebone café.
At Amanzi you can take your tea piping hot, iced cold, as a frappuTEAno (my word), a smoothie, in the form of bubble tea, as a non-alcoholic mojito, taken away in a caddy just as loose leaves or in those cute triangle one serving bags, and you can find it in almost any caffeine level you like. They have this enormous interactive tea wall filled with 50 different types of tea (rotated regularly out of around 150 that Amanzi blend at their US base) that you can look at, touch and smell, then sit down to drink.
Almost as good as the green tea mojito, which was stunning.
I’ve been back already. A trip to Selfridges just down the road no longer seems complete with a stop in at Amanzi. They do cake too, so if you pop in and order a lovely Japanese gyokuro tea along with a cake you can kind of cancel the cake calories out as the tea is so good for the detox…
See, you can keep those New Year’s resolutions. You’ll find me downstairs in Amanzi taking advantage of their free wifi, comfy seats and endless supplies of tea upstairs.
Amanzi can be found at 24 New Cavendish Street, London W16 8TX.
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Disclosure: I was not paid to write a review but I did have an awesome time making cocktails with the staff at Amanzi and other bloggers and received a lovely caddy of loose-leaf tea to take home.
